Educational reform as we know it will die says Steve Peha. He makes the case that the reforms of the past few decades – testing, curriculum standards, etc. – have not make a difference, and that technology products themselves haven’t worked. Rather, he suggests Agile processes and concepts (scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean) could be used to run schools more effectively.
Learning is iterative, learning about learning is iterative. And yet, we attempt waterfall-model-type reforms that are hugely expensive and take years before we find out, they didnt really make a difference. The better way, of making incremental improvements, measuring and iterating, via agile methods, makes a lot of sense. Since Government-driven processes are inherently over-controlled and, due to risk-aversion and politics, rarely adaptive, one wonders if this approach would bog down as much as other reforms. Merit pay was to incentivize innovation; charter schools was to break the bonds that prevented innovation; testing was to measure performance (a key element in agile is measurement and iteration). So rather than think of prior reforms as dead ends, perhaps we should consider them as incomplete and missing the key ingredient – an operational model for improvement. Agile processes provide that.